I grew up in a rural area with frequent power outages. Because electricity wasn’t a given, especially in the winter, we always had kerosene lamps and flashlights on hand, and a woodstove with a range top and oven that we could cook with.
I had to learn the hard way that digital files aren’t always a given, either. Some of the things I wrote down about what my kids said and did when they were little, disappeared forever due to my using a 1990s word processing program with a now defunct file format. Thankfully at some point I switched to plain text and printouts; but those earlier files are lost for good.
The recent Crowdstrike outage briefly threw people back into the analog world with mom and pop businesses accepting only cash, and healthcare organizations resorting to keeping records on paper.
This is a good reminder that if you really, really want to depend on having something in the future, or allowing someone else to access it in the future (e.g. after a death in the family), it’s a good idea to keep a physical analog copy: paper books, printed photos, paper files and folders.
Digital documents and writings and images are subject to all kinds of hazards. Websites, articles, e-books, and apps disappear. Devices fail or are subject to planned obsolescence. File formats change. Links rot.
For digital documents you want to keep for a long time, I suggest the Three P’s:
And especially,
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Wondering how to manage your paper-based or hybrid paper-digital systems? Ask me a question.